Re: [glob2-devel] Embedded scripting language (again)

[Bradley Arsenault]

On 2/20/06, Stéphane Magnenat <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Bradley,
>
> We have been thinking about this for a long time indeed. Don't forget that the
> determinism is not the only constraint, but another one is the ability to
> checkpoint the VM in order to save and reload a game. Another one is the
> ability to seamlessly run several threads (stories in SGSL) with co-routine
> operations (wait in SGSL) and preemption on buggy thread (stories are
> preempted after a thousand of continuous instructions in SGSL).

The checkpointing thing is only a convience for the scripter, not a
requirement, and with no other choice, it can be ignored. The
multi-threading task shouldn't be an issue whatso-ever in any
language, and if you intend to do pre-emption, the scripts must run in
steps rather than threads, or you could put a nasty callback inside an
executed function or a trapper of some sort, but thats going to look
quite ugly.

>
> Marv and I have looked into several languages, the bests candidates are indeed
> Squirrel (http://squirrel.sourceforge.net/), but the multi-threading and
> checkpoint stuff is not trivial, and tea (http://lue.dk/prj/tea), whose
> author was willing to help, but who seems to have disappeared lately.
>
> In fact, the language that looks the most suitable is... Unreal script, as it
> has concepts of states inside the language, which could be used to have, in
> the future, one thread per unit. But it is not free at all, so we better have
> to forget about it.
>
> Lisp syntax are a big joke, lua is squirrel--, python is probably, for our
> use, slightly bloated, but this can be discussed.
>
Python is somewhat bloated, like I said, but having used it for allot,
other than that, i personally believe its our best choice.
> I think that there is two main constraints for language choice:
> * the capabilities of the language
> * the language from the user perspective
>
> I don't see how you want to fix missing capabilities afterwards, hacking on a
> big language is not trivial. For hacking, tea is probably the best candidate.
>
Hacking on a big language is easier than you think, though it depends
on the language and interface.
> Have a nice day,
>
> Steph
>
> --
> http://nct.ysagoon.com
>
>
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